Michael Oppenheimer: "I’m upset and troubled—as I rarely am, because I’ve been involved in this issue for 35 years. I’ve seen a lot of ups and downs, but this is the most discouraging. It is more discouraging than when George W. Bush withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol."

"We don’t have much time to avoid the two degrees of warming that would destabilize ice sheets, entail extreme heatwaves, and potentially undermine food security. And this decision is just enough to push us over the edge, in my view. I think it’s totally unrealistic now to believe that we are going to meet that objective."

"So in a personal way, for someone who has worked on the issue for decades, this more so than any other setback seems to indicate that it’s highly unlikely that we can make the two-degree goal. The Trump action pushed us over the edge, and basically Trump owns the responsibility now for this problem."

(04-06-2017 10:23 PM)Rahn127 Wrote: I think at this point many of us know that this has moved into an extinction level event.

It will take a century or less but it will happen.

We'll have more wars over resources as the temps rise to a new normal of 120 in the summer, then 130.
Famines will rise as food production and housing moves underground.

With large numbers of deaths, new deadly viruses will arise or vice versa.

When all is said and done, only 10,000 or so will survive and ride it out for the next 50,000 years.

I don't think the weather is what's going to kill us. It's just going to make living harder, and critical resources more scarce, resulting in major migrations that trigger xenophobic hostility and greed, with nation-states eventually going at one another... with nukes. That's what's going to kill us. By comparison, the rest is just annoying. Unless you happen to be one of the starving people forced to abandon your coastline cities, I suppose.

"Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?" - E. O. Wilson

"At least 10 states and a slew of U.S. cities have signaled that they are committing to the Paris climate accord despite President Trump's decision last week to withdraw the U.S. from the pact. The 10 states that have signed onto the alliance include California, New York, Washington, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Virginia, Oregon and Hawaii. All of the states governors are Democrats except those representing Massachusetts and Vermont. Nine other states and Washington, D.C. have also reportedly said that they plan to abide by the guidelines of the Paris agreement. Major cities including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia have also indicated that they will also do so as well."

"Norfolk, Va., is half a world away from Antarctica's melting ice sheets. Yet this low-lying city on the Chesapeake Bay is one of the places most vulnerable to tidal flooding from rising sea levels in the U.S. As the climate heats up, in the most extreme scenario Norfolk and other East Coast communities can expect waters to climb as much as 11.5 feet—about 3.5 feet more than the global average—by 2100."

The worst-case prediction for a specific location above is in contrast to the predicted global average below:

"Global sea level has risen by about 8 inches since reliable record keeping began in 1880. It is projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet by 2100. This is the result of added water from melting land ice and the expansion of seawater as it warms. In the next several decades, storm surges and high tides could combine with sea level rise and land subsidence to further increase flooding in many regions. Sea level rise will continue past 2100 because the oceans take a very long time to respond to warmer conditions at the Earth’s surface. Ocean waters will therefore continue to warm and sea level will continue to rise for many centuries at rates equal to or higher than those of the current century."